Huffington Post
1.24.16 | Tyler Kingkade
Students at Stanford University are frustrated.
Multiple protests over how the university handles sexual assault have beset Stanford's Palo Alto campus in the past two years. The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights has four concurrent investigations open into whether Stanford violated the gender equity law Title IX in its response to reports of sexual assault. Faculty has issued an open letter criticizing the school's proposed changes to its policy handling sexual harassment and assault.
At a well-attended town hall in November, students challenged how the administration is dealing with sexual violence, to which Provost John Etchemendy responded that it wasn't pushing anything "under the rug" or trying to downplay the issue. Other students disagree.
"This became really real to me after the town hall and seeing people crying and not being heard," said Stephanie Pham, a senior who co-founded the campus activist group One In Five. "They're not being heard, they're being silenced."
All of this criticism came prior to a report Friday by The Huffington Post about how a student accused of physical and sexual assault escaped punishment until after he graduated, and was never referred to law enforcement.
